For reasons that quickly become obvious, Michigan native Chris Getz takes encouragement from Dave Dombrowski's tenure in Detroit, which saw the Tigers in the playing World Series three years after losing 119 games in the former White Sox executive's first full season in control.
For joining the 121-loss White Sox, new hitting director Ryan Fuller takes encouragement from literally his last job, since his Orioles tenure began when the major league club was still the AL East doormat and their player development system lacked for modern resources. Having seen the Baltimore major league club to mature to back-to-back playoff appearances, working the past season with a Trajekt pitching machine in house and believing that organization is set up well "for the next decade," Fuller sees his new White Sox optimism as grounded in his own experience rather than naïveté.
"We thought it could take a while, but when you find special people with a clear plan in place, it can happen quickly," Fuller said in a phone call with Sox Machine on Tuesday. "I love building things, whether it be working on myself or finding the people who are excited about the process of doing something tough, it's always exciting to me. We know there's work to do but we have the people here to do it."
Part of the nature of the beast is that Fuller is now helming and touting his confidence in a hitting department publicly associated with last season's failures. He's working with hitting coordinators Alan Zinter and Danny Santin, and was speaking fresh off yet another Zoom call with hitting coach Marcus Thames, as they've discovered they both love the practice of flying out to players' homes for offseason check-ins; a means of showing investment in the individual.
With all the comparisons Fuller makes between his role and Brian Bannister's, it conjures memories about how many stories about Bannister center around hands-on work, him showing a pitcher a new grip during a one-on-one bullpen session to spark a leap. Fond of the phrase "you can make the best plans in the world behind a laptop, but--", Fuller similarly doesn't plan on ditching his baseball pants anytime soon, and wants to do a lot of in-person coaching, roving across the organization. But in a world where every hitter has their own private instruction -- a side of the equation Fuller has been on, too -- coordinating everything across multiple coaches is part of the job.
"Whenever we make a player plan, we want to make sure that their hitting coach is connected to it, that they have the ability to ask questions," Fuller said. "It's not handing them the plan and saying, 'We'll see you in spring training.' We're going to give you a little break, but once you get swinging we expect video. We want to call. We want to keep talking. We're going to talk to your swing coach, anybody who you value. It's that ongoing relationship that never really stops throughout the year."
Astute readers pointed out that Fuller didn't really testify to the essentiality of pulled fly balls in his introductory Zoom, simply saying "everybody wants that," and it turns out that was no oversight. Fuller views the idea of telling a fast-swinging power hitter like Luis Robert Jr. and a short-stroked contact merchant like Luis Arraez that they have the same goals to be counterproductive, an inefficient use of disparate skill sets that bring their own benefits to different situations. Fuller counters with a quick example that Juan Soto produces elite contact and power production mostly from an exceptionally flat swing plane that would secure different results if taught to someone with a different skill set.
Orioles players have been swift to insist that Fuller and other Baltimore hitting coaches didn't deserve blame for a late-season scoring swoon that drew criticism for a lack of successful situational hitting. If nothing else, Fuller's words reflect someone who went through that experience. Advocate for "swinging up," and the new White Sox director of hitting would question how that plan would work against high riding four-seamers from Gerrit Cole. Talk too much about manufacturing runs and he'll ask how that competes on a hot August day with the wind blowing out, and vice versa.
Without getting too much into specifics, Fuller expressed excitement to work in the Sox hitting lab in Arizona, praised his conversations with Getz about his commitment to provide equipment that will facilitate his love for high-speed practice reps, and said team biomechanists and the revamped research and development department will be part of that effort. But he also spoke about never losing a "JUCO mindset" of being able to recreate the necessary drills with coaching, and finding inventive ways to throw batting practice that will prepare his lineup for the task at hand. From eight years of doing this, speaking to Fuller reminded me less of talking to other tech-savvy hitting gurus, and more like listening to someone trying to build Paul Konerko from scratch.
Stick with me here.
"We need to have the ability to not just be a one-plane swing guy, where we're only matched up for one type of pitcher," Fuller said. "I want these guys to be able to train and be dynamic enough with their movements and bat paths that they understand. 'Okay, you know what? Tonight I might have to be a little bit taller in my setup, because I need to stay on top of this riding fastball at the top. Or, you know what? I'm going to change my setup. I'm going to be a little bit more hunched over to cover that bottom of the zone where I know he's going to give up a mistake.'"
Konerko didn't put up Hall of Fame numbers, or have the longest hot streaks ever, but he inspired a level of reverence from fellow hitters because of how malleable his swing could be for the situation, right as the game was tilting toward a maximalist trend of just firing off A-swings as much as possible and trusting the boom and bust-shaped production to balance out in the end.
“He’d go one pitch with a leg kick, the next pitch with no stride, the next pitch he’d have his hands on his shoulders, the next pitch he’d have them down by his waist,” [A.J.] Pierzynski said. “I don’t know how he did it and had so much success.”
“He could use a 35-ounce bat, he could use a 32-ounce bat,” Jim Thome said. “If a guy was on third base and you needed him to hit the ball to the right side of the field, he had the capability of punching a ball to right field, getting that RBI, but also if they hung him a breaking ball inside, he could pull you for a home run. That’s the advantage he brought hitting in the middle of your order.”
“He went so far down the road to analyzing himself and looking in the mirror and be analytical about himself that he could make adjustments on the fly,” Walker said. “I could just sit there and watch him and the pitching coach calls timeout, and he starts doing walk-up drills and, oh my goodness, he just found something. During a pitching coach’s visit to the pitcher’s mound and then turn around two pitches later and hit a home run.”
As a site rule that could be dubbed The Gordon Beckham Principle, we never in good conscience recommend that someone tries to emulate Konerko to this degree. But this is the sort of image Fuller conjures about trying to build hitters who can respond to whatever the game throws at them, rather than being limited to success in specific matchups. Hawk Harrelson would sound as much in love with Konerko -- if not more -- when he would stay with a two-strike slider low-and-away for a single to right field for an RBI single as when he flicked a get-me-over heater to the left field bullpen, and Fuller's words can strike similar chords while playing entirely different instruments.
"That's the big separator for guys who are truly great: They want to make those adjustments. It's not changing who they are, but taking the feedback that the game's providing them," Fuller said. "Everything that we do out on the field needs to be battle-tested inside the cage beforehand, and we never want a guy go out there trying something for the first time out on a major league field. We have plenty of time during the day, with early work hours of time available in the cage for these guys to get calibrated to their movements, to the pitch shape we're hunting that night."
Of course, the proof is in the tangible progress on the field. Pedro Grifol spoke about discussing the metrics of opposing pitchers in granular detail so that Sox offenses would be prepared for what they were seeing on any given night. I was there when Frank Menechino said "Fuck the home run, let's hit .300" but also there when he spoke about having a lineup full of reactive hitters that he wanted to just focus on looking for mistakes up in the zone that they could drive in the air. If the desires of hitting coaches could be easily projected onto the diamond, we're probably not discussing the new look to White Sox hitting development in the first place.
With Fuller largely diving in on the 40-man roster so far, and just because of his central nature to the White Sox offense, restoring Luis Robert Jr.'s effectiveness is an early litmus test. While alluding to some elements of Robert's lower half mechanics that can be cleaned up, Fuller also discussed building out his approach into a power hitter in the mold of Aaron Judge -- someone who is an aggressive swinger in zones where he can drive the ball and inactive outside of it. Robert ended the season feeling like his efforts to cut down on chase rate had made him too passive on fastballs in the zone and his numbers against velocity reflect that, and Fuller emphasized that honing in on a more disciplined approach for him needs to come from an affirming viewpoint.
"Not saying that's how it was at all, but just from other guys I've worked with in the past, instead of talking about 'we don't want to chase, we want to cut down on chase, all our focus is on chase,'" Fuller explained, "I will always decide on bringing the information to the guys that we want to zone in on and focus. Where they feel going into that bat that they're not trying to avoid something, but rather they're trying to execute what they've worked on, their aggressive plan and the spot they want to attack."
Andrew Vaughn has been at the opposite end of the spectrum in his White Sox tenure, where he's repeatedly been shaving down the size of his loading action in order to keep pace with professional-level velocity. In exchange, he's regularly done his best work against major league velocity, but has seemingly sacrificed the proficiency for avoiding chases on off speed pitches that he flaunted in college. His stagnation makes him a non-tender candidate, but if the early impact of Fuller's addition is going to be trying to convert on veteran bounce-back seasons or activating post-hype young players with unrealized pedigree, well, Vaughn is already just hanging around.
For all of us who have been stuck here for years, waiting for Vaughn to take the first base mainstay baton from Konerko is a tired topic. For Fuller, the raw materials might be as newly intriguing as anyone available on the open market.
"I will say this: This is a guy from a really special draft class picked with a really high pick," Fuller said. "This is a special bat and you see unbelievable contact skills. He can impact the baseball. As you alluded to, swing decisions for any hitter going through their first few years in the big leagues, there's going to be some seasoning periods and learning who you are with the zones you can control. He's another guy really focusing on the spots that make you special. [It's about] the trade-offs. If it's that nasty slider down and away, let's tip our cap and we're going to wait out the mistakes we can handle. But really excited to talk more with the team about him, talk with the coaches and meet him because it's a very special bat with high potential."
That Fuller has only been in the organization for a few weeks becomes clear when asking for details on players with whom he's yet to work, and doesn't feel ready to provide an expansive progress report on, at least not on the record. He has a lot of detail to offer about getting Austin Slater's bat angle in place for contact earlier into his rotation. For Colson Montgomery's Arizona Fall League performance, or Miguel Vargas' offseason effort to add strength behind his sterling strike zone judgment, it's more generalized optimism and affirming that working in coordination with the conditioning staff is of paramount importance.
Having opened the chat by stating his excitement to connect and build relationships with the entire White Sox media sphere, this should be the first of many long conversations with Fuller. For now, any White Sox personnel touting the untapped potential of players who have yet to produce in the majors is probably a tough sell to his intended audience. But Fuller is tasked with making it sound like an opportunity.
